Best Films of 2014 (#10-6)

#3-10 on this were incredibly difficult to rank. I consider all of them to be fantastic films, but they have so little in common that I have a hard time comparing them. My point is, this is my ranking based on how I'm feeling at this very moment, and if you ask me tomorrow, this list could look incredibly different.

Check out #50-21 here.
Check out #20-16 here.
Check out #15-11 here.

Enjoy.

10.) Boyhood (Richard Linklater)

                Boyhood is the one film I saw in 2014 that I firmly believe is essential viewing. Obviously, most of the discussion has focused on its twelve-year production, and there’s certainly a power inherent to watching a child grow up on screen, but the film is so much more than its central gimmick. Its brilliance comes from the way director Richard Linklater makes no attempt to find Meaning in the life of some average kid from Texas, and instead chooses to focus on the small, seemingly unimportant moments, allowing the truths to come naturally. People stumble into our lives, and, for a while, they seem crucial, and then they’re gone. Moments that seem important end up meaning nothing, and moments that seem like they mean nothing end up being important. No other film has done a better job of capturing the messiness of life.

09.) John Wick (Chad Stahelski & David Leitch)

                I’m still sort of stunned by how great this film is. The trailers for John Wick made it seem like the latest in a long line of increasingly uninteresting action flicks where scary-looking dudes beat the hell out of a whole bunch of other scary-looking dudes, and, for the most part, it is. But there’s a sadism and brutality to films like Taken and The Equalizer that John Wick replaces with beauty and elegance. It’s a cliché to compare intensely choreographed fight scenes to ballet, but for once the statement seems applicable. Then there’s the film’s goofy sense of humor, the downright gorgeous cinematography (that night club scene), and the way it does a better job of setting up an entire mythology than Marvel has managed to do in a dozen films. And without a trace of expository dialogue to boot. I could honestly go on and on, but I’ll leave you with this;

“In a bar, I once saw him kill three men... with a pencil.”

Perfection.

08.) Gone Girl (David Fincher)

                For some reason, this film has proven incredibly difficult to write about, so I’ll cheat and just keep it simple. Gone Girl is a twisted marital drama with a pitch-black sense of humor and a scathing satire of marriage and societal roles. I love it. That is all.

07.) Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)

                An alien (?) in the form of a beautiful woman (Scarlett Johansson) arrives in Scotland and begins luring lonely men to her lair and to a mysterious yet clearly undesirable fate. That’s a pretty straightforward setup, but Jonathan Glazer’s film is any but straightforward. What begins as a mysterious and slightly terrifying portrait of a monster only becomes more disturbing as she begins to develop more human traits and feelings, starting as the predator and ending as the prey. We see the world through her eyes, and it is have never looked uglier.

06.) The Immigrant (James Gray)

                James Gray has been the most under-appreciated American director for well over a decade now, and it certainly didn’t help that the Weinstein Company barely promoted The Immigrant when it was released back in May. As a result, the film didn’t get the attention it deserves, which is a damn shame, because it's a masterpiece. It’s the story of a struggling Polish immigrant (Marion Cotillard) who, immediately after stepping of the boat, is separated from her sister and threatened with deportation, forcing her to go to work for a pimp (Joaquin Phoenix) who secretly adores her. She then meets a magician (Jeremy Renner) who seems like her shot at the American Dream. Gray, consciously working in a Classic Hollywood style, has created a heartbreaking epic of faith and disillusionment in America. Marion Cotillard, possibly the finest living actress, gives one of the best performances of the year as a woman whose struggles to exist in an extremely sexist society are only worsened by the fact that she’s an immigrant. And then there's that breathtaking final shot, which is easily among the two or three greatest final shots in any movie ever. Just like the rest of the film, it’s stunning in its beauty and devastating in its power.

Currently available on Netflix Instant.

Come back tomorrow when I post my list of the top five films of the year.